During the recent wildfire crisis, bloggers exposed Edinaya Rossiya party members for faking involvement in fighting the blaze. Photograph: Andrey Smirnov/AFP/Getty

Artyom Tiunov, a 25-year-old architect from Novosibirsk, was recently detained by Russian police on suspicion of theft and subjected to 14 hours of brutal interrogation. The police hoped he would confess to a crime he didn't commit. They hoped he would provide them with an open-and-shut case; every police department has to present a certain number of these in a given a period or be subjected to severe questioning over their low clear-up rate. This pressure has become a major source of the abuse and corruption which everybody, including the police themselves, hopes to see off in the reforms scheduled for 2012-13..

But instead the police had to release Tiunov after being confronted with CCTV footage of him exiting a restaurant at the time of the alleged crime. Tiunov described the whole ordeal on his Livejournal.com page – a blogging platform massively popular in Russia ,hosting over 1.5 million Russian-language blogs – and the post, titled "Wrong place, wrong time", attracted more than 1,000 comments in just two days. But instead of going to a protest rally against police brutality – not effective enough, he says – he continues to blog about his confrontation with the police over his unlawful detention and files complaints and requests for investigation.

The online outrage is gaining momentum and the whole case is now too public to be ignored by the authorities or mainstream media. Tiunov says he saw the chief of the police department that had detained him clutch a printed-out blogpost with all the outraged comments – which means that they are well aware of the public attention the case is receiving. However, he remains calmly realistic: "He didn't seem scared or concerned. The chance that the online hype will make them more courteous towards detainees or at least more cautious is measly. But that doesn't mean I'll stop trying. And everybody should do the same, then it'll start to change".

Tiunov seems to be one of a new breed of Russian dissenter: a young, smart, iPhone-wielding professional, tech-savvy enough to understand the power of the internet and to use it to his advantage. He may not have any political persuasion at all, but when he runs into trouble with the state's institutions, he won't be attending a political demonstration and risk being batoned or arrested. He knows exactly how to generate enough hype to make his case public, and the online environment seems to be quite encouraging of his actions. Many have noted the curious absence of censorship on the Russian-speaking internet which largely remains a free-for-all zone, quite unlike traditional media which are kept on a tight leash, as demonstrated by the recent simultaneous smear campaigns against Moscow's rebellious mayor Yuri Luzhkov, and neighbouring post-Soviet countries where bloggers are intimidated and opposition websites shut down on a regular basis.

For example, the owner of @KermlinRussia, a spoof of Dmitry Medvedev's official Twitter account spewing out sarcastic parodies of the president's every tweet, says he hasn't been contacted by anyone from the real Kremlin with any cease-and-desist demands, which suggests that Medvedev himself might actually enjoy a bit of good internet comedy (although his own tweets are snore-inducingly tedious). Or it's a case of "won't dignify with a response" – we can't know for sure. In any case, jokes, cartoons and Photoshopped images of both Medvedev and Putin – often quite venomous – abound in Runet, and none of their authors have been under any pressure to take them down.

Yes, some are being prosecuted for bitter online remarks and servers confiscated, and some pro-Kremlin politicians call for censorship crudely disguised as "security measures", but apart from several isolated and widely publicised cases Runet seems to remain virtually free from state control. Google Transparency Report doesn't list a single data or removal request from Russia – unlike, for example, a staggering 4,287 from the USA.

Instead, Edinaya Rossiya (United Russia), the ruling party, employs a different strategy. Recently, it proudly announced the start of Project Blogosphere aimed at "political domination through direct communication with voters in social networks and online debates", or, in normal-speak, pro-active propaganda rather than suppression. That, however, is proving to be a risky strategy: older politicians, encouraged to start their own blog, rely on their assistants to generate Soviet-style triumphalist reports with little to no actual feedback, while younger, more active members of Edinaya Rossiya have caused some major PR blunders for the party, much to the amusement of the online population.

For example, during the recent wildfire crisis, Ruslan Gattarov and Vladimir Burmatov, two senior members of ER's youth wing (Molodaya Gvardiya, The Young Guard of United Russia), tried to use the disaster for their own political gain. They assembled a volunteer firefighting team, dressed them in party colours and went on to extinguish a fire in a forest several hundred kilometres from Moscow, all the while tweeting and posing for photographs with flags and party logos in the foreground.

What they didn't realise was that their every move, tweet and photo was being meticulously analysed by the very people they hoped to impress and "dominate" – the bloggers. Soon a detailed blogpost appeared dismissing Gattarov and Burmatov's proud reports as fake: their clothes looked far too clean for a messy operation like forest firefighting, and the area in question wasn't even on fire. As it turned out, they simply set a bush on fire and photographed themselves putting it out to boast the party's active involvement in the firefighting operation. Outrage ensued, much to the embarrassment of both the Young Guard and the party.

These are just a few examples of how the internet promotes transparency in Russia and accountability of those in power. We can't know for sure whether it's due to the government's inherited inertia and reliance on old-fashioned top-down management, or whether this lax attitude towards online content is a genuine sign of democratisation. But please blog on.